In the field of airport monitoring and surveillance, video cameras are used to provide live and recorded video feeds of selected areas of an airport or airport surface, such as the airport apron where airplanes are parked and passengers and cargo are loaded and unloaded. Airport aprons are busy at typical airports, with a multitude of different vehicles and persons moving about to perform the multitude of tasks together constituting the airport's operations. Airport aprons are typically extensive in physical dimensions, and a number of cameras are required in order to provide adequate coverage of the entire apron. It is often desirable to provide a single, panoramic view of an airport apron based on multiple video feeds, instead of a number of different single-camera views, as providing a panoramic view facilitates an operator's monitoring and surveillance tasks. In the particular field of airport monitoring and surveillance, it is further desirable for such a panoramic view to be provided based on video feeds in real-time such that the panoramic view provides an accurate and current view of the activities on the airport apron.
Various techniques are known for the capture and generation of panoramic still images based on multiple still images from different cameras, and include methods for the automatic stitching of still images. Such techniques are suboptimal, however, for the generation of panoramic videos based on video feeds from multiple cameras, and particularly for the generation of real-time panoramic videos. Conventional computer vision algorithms, although sometimes used for still image panorama generation, require substantial computer processing resources to stitch images, and are therefore suboptimal for stitching video image frames continuously in real time. (The term “computer vision” is here used to designate image processing algorithms which work exclusively on rectangular arrays of pixels.) Additionally, lens distortion correction using computer vision methods involves remapping every single pixel in the original undistorted image to a new position in an undistorted image and then interpolating the missing image information, which is computationally intensive.
Accordingly, alternative techniques for generating panoramic videos from multiple video feeds in real time are desirable, including when based on video feeds from multiple video cameras covering an airport apron for monitoring and surveillance purposes.